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Breaking on CNBC: USSC delays Chyrsler asset sale! Mourdock: USe of Tarp Funds in automotive industry was illegal Obama admin had urged USSC NOT to keep chrysler deal on hold

A top advisor to Barack Obama says, if elected president, the Democratic candidate will look to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter. “Of course, he’s interested in people of integrity and competence, that’s a given,” Pepperdine University law professor Doug Kmiec told CNSNews.com. “He’s also indicated that he’s most attracted to the kind of justice represented by Justice Breyer and Justice Souter.” Kmiec, who supports Obama and has been serving as a campaign “surrogate” for the Illinois Democratic senator, said Obama admires the qualities Souter and Breyer represent. “These justices are individuals...

The president of a conservative Catholic group says his organization is protesting New York's Fordham University for giving an award to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. The award is the 2008 Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize and is given to an individual who has been at the top of his or her career in promoting legal ethics. However, Patrick Riley, president of The Cardinal Newman Society, says the problem with honoring Justice Breyer with the award is that he is pro-choice -- and Fordham University is a Catholic school. "We have a serious concern about this, especially at a Catholic university, when...

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in New York is among those criticizing Fordham University for giving an award to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a supporter of abortion rights.A spokesman for the New York Archdiocese said Cardinal Edward Egan was surprised to learn Breyer would receive an award from Fordham's law school and has spoken to the Catholic university's leaders to ensure "that a mistake of this sort will not happen again."Spokesman Joseph Zwilling said Monday that Egan was talking about Breyer's votes on the Court in favor of abortion rights.The protest against Breyer is being led...

Group also whitewashed MoveOn.org hate speech, published anti-Christian hate video The National Jewish Democratic Council is grasping at straws in its latest effort to smear John McCain. “McCain Picking on Jewish Supreme Court Justices?” (http://njdc.typepad.com/njdcs_blog/2008/08/mccain-picking.html) says, When Pastor Rick Warren asked Senator John McCain to name his least favorite current U.S. Supreme Court justices it seemed that he was picking on the Jewish members of our highest court. A review of the Kelo vs. New London decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that municipalities can collude with private developers to use eminent domain to steal property for private...

WASHINGTON - The nine justices in black robes file into the Supreme Court consumed with thoughts about the great legal issues of the day. Only one of them is likely to ask questions involving raccoons, an unruly son, pet oysters or even the dreaded "tomato children." When Justice Stephen Breyer leans toward his microphone at the end of the bench, lawyers can expect to be asked almost anything. The 69-year-old Breyer is the court's most frequent practitioner of the hypothetical question, a conjurer of images that are unusual and occasionally bizarre. "The last time I was up there arguing, it...

SAN FRANCISCO - The Supreme Court's most recent term was a difficult one, Justice Stephen Breyer said Saturday, because he found himself on the losing end of several key cases. "I was in dissent quite a lot and I wasn't happy," Breyer said at the American Bar Association's annual meeting. Breyer was one of four liberal justices who dissented in cases involving abortion rights, school integration and pay discrimination. In the school case, in which the court struck down student assignment plans in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle, his frustration bubbled over in a lengthy dissent that was twice as long...

The left is astir again. From Slate to the op ed pages of the New York Times and the People for the American Way (PFAW) handouts, it is clear that the left is ginning up to replay their war against any judicial nominee this President may yet propose for any forthcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer shook his head. He rolled his eyes. He even grimaced once or twice as he listened to Chief Justice John Roberts read the majority opinion in the school diversity case on Thursday. As the high court ended its term, Breyer showed obvious disappointment with the opinion. For liberal members of the court, it was not the only time this year their emotions surfaced during normally placid readings of the court's opinions.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Here's what Justice Stephen Breyer revealed about the Supreme Court in his appearance on a radio quiz show: His judicial robe gathers no lint because it's synthetic. When it came to cracking wise, Breyer held his own with a panel of people who are paid to be funny on National Public Radio's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me." Being the funniest Supreme Court justice, he said, "is like being one of the shortest tall people." On why he even agreed to answer questions outside his area of expertise in the humbling, and often embarrassing, "Not My Job"...

A few weeks back, we opined on comments from liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who admitted that he was willing to ignore the plain wording of the Constitution to accomplish what he perceived as a greater good. In a television interview, Justice Breyer said that his belief that he was protecting the integrity of our democracy led him to vote to uphold the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform measure -- secured by a narrow 5-4 majority -- even though parts of it run counter to the First Amendment. Last week, however, a federal appeals court took a step toward giving...

If judicial confirmation hearings in the Senate were one-tenth as illuminating as last night's debate between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer at the Capitol Hilton, there would be a booming market for Supreme Court action figurines. Co-sponsored by the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society (the Birkenstocks and bow ties of the legal universe), the debate has Breyer and Scalia whacking their way through the possibility of "justice," the limitations of constitutional history, and, throughout the evening—the possibility of persuasion. The justices agree more than they differ, and they agree about nothing so much as the...

Many conservatives reportedly chose not to vote in November to protest the Republican Party's abandonment of conservative principles. One potential consequence of that boycott could be a forfeiture of the chance to finally secure a majority of "originalist" justices on the Supreme Court. Granted, it was going to be tough enough for President Bush to win confirmation for another conservative nominee to the court in the face of a militant minority should a vacancy occur, but now that the Democrats have control it will be virtually impossible. This is something disgruntled conservatives should contemplate before sitting the next one out....

It’s time to give Justices like Stephen Breyer their just dues by no longer respectively entertaining their legal thesis built solely on ignorance or their hopelessly flawed historical antidotes’. Justice Breyer rhetorically asks James Madison, "James, when you wrote that document, did you have in mind a document that would actually work to produce a democratic society over a period of three or four or five hundred years, or did you want a document of pristine logic that would in fact not last all that long?" Breyer asked. "Did you want it to be workable or not?" Breyer surely have...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Show White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices, according to a poll on pop culture released on Monday. According to the poll by Zogby International, commissioned by the makers of a new game show on pop culture called "Gold Rush," 57 percent of Americans could identify J.K. Rowling's fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, while only 50 percent could name the British prime minister, Tony Blair. The pollsters spoke to 1,213 people across the United States. The results had a margin...

Aaron Harber of the Aaron Harber show (harbertv.com) has an interview with Justices Breyer and O’Connor tomorrow afternoon, and he has solicited SCOTUSblog readers to help him formulate some questions for the two Honorable interviewees. So, if you have a query or two about the law or the Court that you think would be appropriate for either of the two Justices, post it as a comment on this post or e-mail jharrow [at] akingump.com by 1:00 PM Eastern Time tomorrow, Thursday, July 6. Hopefully, we can send Aaron a few good questions and he will report back to us with...

<p>LOST LIBERTY HOTEL GETS SECOND WIND--AN AIRPORT Eminent Domain for Hot Air Balloons?</p> <p>"I'm looking for a small town in New Hampshire to make a loud roar against the Kelo decision on its anniversary-June 23rd," stated Logan Darrow Clements.</p> <p>According to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in "Kelo vs. City of New London" a government may use eminent domain to seize homes and land to promote economic development or increase tax revenue. Meanwhile, New Hampshire statute XXXIX chapter 423 allows a town to seize land for an airport outside its border. Since this statute does not require the land to be adjacent territory any town in New Hampshire could seize land inside any other town. Thus any town in New Hampshire could seize David Souter's land in Weare, N.H. or Stephen Breyer's land in Plainfield, N.H. for the creation of an airport.</p>

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer paid a hushed visit to Harvard Law School yesterday, calling Bush v. Gore the “most stressful” case during his 12-year tenure and delivering a short address on the high court’s operations. Breyer’s speech to Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree’s criminal law class was kept secret from everyone, including Ogletree’s students, until minutes before it began. After a warm greeting from the first-year students, Breyer, a Law School graduate, delivered a relaxed talk about life as a Supreme Court justice. When asked to choose the most important case of his tenure, Breyer...

NEW YORK - The job of a justice on the nation's highest court is to patrol the boundaries of American society, not to decide what kind of society it should have, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said Tuesday. People are suspicious of what the court does and think it intrudes into what they do, Breyer said. "Democracy has boundaries, or rails," he said during a luncheon at New York Law School. "We are the boundary patrol." The 68-year-old justice noted that the word democracy is not found in the Constitution. But the concept, he said, is there. "When you understand...

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer discussed his judicial philosophy and the role of the Constitution Sunday afternoon during a public discussion with politics professor and constitutional law scholar Robert George. Breyer spoke in an almost-filled McCosh 50, touching on topics such as the importance of political participation, the "tools" that justices utilize to make constitutional rulings and the Supreme Court nominee confirmation process. "The primary goal [of the Constitution] is not to tell people what to do, but for people to decide for themselves what to do through a democratic process," Breyer said. "[The Supreme Court justices] are patrolling the...

Interestingly, Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer said the following: "You want to try a war crime. You want to say this is a war crimes tribunal," Breyer said. "One, this is not a war, at least not an ordinary war. Two, it's not a war crime because that doesn't fall under international law. And three it's not a war crime tribunal or commission because (there is) no emergency." So we are not at war - I wonder what our soldiers would have to say about that.

Three disturbing trends threaten the free speech of all Americans: 1. the attempts by certain liberal judges to have constitutional issues decided by the application of international laws, 2. “hate speech” being redefined as any criticism of a religion or of any characteristic of a group, and 3. the attempts now underway to reinstate what is cunningly called “the Fairness Doctrine”. Supreme Court justices Breyer and Ginsburg, both liberals, have recently given speeches in which they argued for the application of international laws in deciding cases that came before the Supreme Court.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said Tuesday the high court has more discussion and debate behind closed doors with its two new members. Breyer, though, said the court "seems to be running very well" under Chief Justice John Roberts, and he doesn't think the extra discussion is a major change. "Perhaps it has to do with younger people," Breyer, 67, told reporters at a news conference before he was to speak at the Clinton Library. President Bush's first nominee to the court, 51-year-old Roberts, was sworn in last fall, becoming the nation's youngest chief justice in...

CHICAGO - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer says he frequently makes decisions about a law's constitutionality by considering its purposes and consequences, which puts him at odds with fellow justices who try to adhere strictly to the language of the Constitution. Breyer, on the court since 1994, didn't single out any particular justice or discuss his new colleagues, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, during his speech Tuesday at the University of Chicago Law School. He said, however, that he hadn't detected any split on the high court along Republican and Democratic ideological lines. "I haven't seen that kind of politics...

It ought to be a major intellectual event in constitutional law when a Justice of the Supreme Court comes forward publicly to explain his theory of judging. Explanation is needed, for by now nobody familiar with the work of the Court believes it confines its rulings to the principles of the historic Constitution. There have always been instances when the Court voted its sympathies rather than anything resembling the Constitution, but over the last half century the divergence between the document and the decisions has sharply increased. Indeed, the criticism that the Court routinely departs from the Constitution’s principles, as...

Chloe Breyer serves an Episcopal priest at St. Mary's Manhattanville Church in West Harlem, New York. She is the daughter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and author of The Close, a reflection on her first year at General Theological Seminary in New York City. She is urbane, witty, and articulate. What she is not, however, is theologically orthodox -- a point she makes painfully clear in "The Earthly Father--What if Mary Wasn't a Virgin?," published December 22, 2005 at the on-line magazine, Slate. "At Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of God's only son," Ms. Breyer notes. "Some...

In his book Active Liberty, Justice Stephen Breyer attempts to develop an alternative to the originalist theory of interpretation that has received so much attention in recent years. Rather than interpret the Constitution based on its original meaning, as originalists like Justice Scalia might, Breyer argues that the Constitution should be interpreted to further political participation -- the active liberty of the ancients as opposed to the modern liberty to do as one pleases. Breyer also maintains that the Constitution (and statutes) should be interpreted using a “purposivist” approach -- i.e. that judges should read constitutional provisions based on their...

A curious e-mail is making the rounds from Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy's communications director, Stephanie Cutter, attacking Judge Alito's response last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee's request for more information about Judge Alito's involvement in a case in Vanguard mutual funds was a party in name only. In Monga v. Ottenberg, a bankruptcy receiver sought to have a party's IRA assets (which included funds in a Vanguard account) made available to pay the bankrupt party's creditors. Vanguard was a party to the case because the bankrupt party sued it to prevent it from releasing his IRA funds to his...

In the weeks after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore, on December 12, 2000, the mood was despondent in the chambers of the Justices on the losing side. The five-to-four ruling ended the recount of the Presidential vote in Florida and assured George W. Bush’s victory in the election. “The clerks were tremendously alienated,” one recalled recently. “A lot of them thought that the Court was a fraud, that the place had sacrificed its legitimacy, and that there really wasn’t much point in taking the whole institution seriously anymore.” Stephen G. Breyer was among the dissenting...

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Thank you for joining us today, Justice Breyer. Tell us why you decided to write this book. JUSTICE STEPHEN BREYER: I wanted to write it because I've learned from really Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, my predecessor Harry Blackmun that there's a tremendous desire for knowledge about the court and how do we actually decide cases? People want to know. It's not the CIA; there's not really a secret. And I wanted to try to help people understand that. And also, I think there's a misconception. I think that many people believe that we're deciding what's good...

<p>That was the vote count when the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer in the 1990s, and it should have been the vote for John Roberts yesterday, instead of 13-5. The two Bill Clinton appointees are every bit as liberal as Judge Roberts is conservative, and they were just as unforthcoming during their confirmation hearings on how they would vote on specific cases.</p>

GEORG HEGEL was a German philosopher of the early 19th century. Hegel believed that history unfolds through a "dialectical" process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity "the absolute idea." History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea.Until recently it appeared that Marxism (which borrowed Hegel's dialectic but replaced "ideas" with economic systems and classes--hence "dialectical materialism") would represent Hegel's most enduring contribution to the...

References to foreign law in Supreme Court opinions have become controversial.... True, the references have increased somewhat, but they remain rare, and no one suggests that the court has directly based any of its interpretations of the Constitution on foreign authority. As the issue was framed recently in a debate between Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, it comes down to this: The former says that if a judge abroad has dealt with a similar problem, "Why don't I read what he says if it's similar enough? Maybe I'll learn something." Yet the latter would exclude such material as wholly...

If the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor opened a gap at the ideological center of the Supreme Court, the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist removed the anchor of its right wing. Yet in what is suddenly a much more complex process of replacing not only O'Connor but also Rehnquist, President Bush has an opportunity to shore up the court's conservative bloc and entrench it. Rehnquist's replacement will probably serve for many years to come; if the new justice's views remain conservative over that time, it will mean the effective perpetuation of a Rehnquist-like vote on the court...

Speaking to a bar association meeting in Las Vegas last week, United States Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens confessed that he thought one of his own recent opinions, though correct as a matter of law, was wrong as a matter of policy. Stevens authored the majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the forced sale of private homes to a commercial real estate developer. Yet he commented at the meeting that his constitutional judgment in that case was "entirely divorced from my judgment concerning the wisdom of the program."It seems that no one has...

What it is, is; "jurisprudential mysticism" and "more liberal BS"... "Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution" explains Justice Breyer's approach and applies it to some of the most divisive topics that come before the court. These include everything from freedom of speech and privacy rights to affirmative action and last June's Ten Commandments cases, which addressed the constitutionality of religious symbols on government property.

While the ink has hardly set on the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 5-4 ruling in the Kelo vs. New London case, a move is underway to urge Congress to pass a constitutional amendment affording greater protection to property owners from unwanted government intervention for the promotion of economic development. Rep. David Floyd, R-Bardstown, has signed on for a resolution that has made its rounds among Kentucky House minority members. Have the Supremes finally flipped their judicial wigs? Here is some background as well as some key language, from the majority as well as the dissent sides: The Connecticut Supreme Court's...

Justice Breyer's Plainfield Home Eyed for ‘Constitution Park' By David Corriveau Valley News Staff Writer Plainfield -- If the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire and its allies have their way, someday two stone monuments will stand on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer's Plainfield property. Short of that, the Libertarians hope to cause Breyer some discomfort for his vote last month on a controversial court decision freeing cities and towns to take land and turn it over to private developers. They are planning a petition drive asking Plainfield voters to take Breyer's 167-acre vacation retreat by eminent domain at...

PLAINFIELD, N.H. - Libertarians upset about a Supreme Court ruling on land taking have proposed seizing a justice's vacation home and turning it into a park, echoing efforts aimed at another justice who lives in the state. Organizers are trying to collect enough signatures to go before the town next spring to ask to use Justice Stephen G. Breyer's 167-acre Plainfield property for a "Constitution Park" with stone monuments to commemorate the U.S. and New Hampshire constitutions. "In the spirit of the ruling, we're recreating the same use of eminent domain," said John Babiarz, the Libertarian Party's state chairman. The...

For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryJuly 16, 2005 President's Radio Address      Audio      THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Under the Constitution, I have the responsibility to nominate a successor to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. This past week I met with Democratic and Republican leaders in the United States Senate and sought their views on the process, and their thoughts on the qualities to look for in a potential nominee. Also, my staff has talked with more than 60 members of the United States Senate. Members of the Senate are receiving a full opportunity to provide their opinions and...

Innovations on Socialist Architecture: The New U.S. Federal Courthouse as "Globalist Realism" New Republican Archive. James F. Burke. The new Federal Courthouse in Boston is the building many joke about. Office-workers in downtown Boston must live with it everyday, as they look down upon its strange-looking structure from high office windows. Many are utterly repulsed by its shape and ugly red-brick facade. Without that facade, that is, stripped to its basic shape and form (imagine it with basic white concrete for the purposes of this exercise), the building is unmistakably Stalinist in design. The only pleasing view of it is...

The media is abuzz and hoping for a great battle. While most Americans are not particularly excited about the choice of a new Associate Justice for the Supreme Court, activists from the left and right, and those who report or comment on politics, are fired up. So it is a worthwhile exercise to separate some of the developing mainstream mythology about the current and future state of the Court from the reality. 1. Sandra Day O’Connor has not been the key swing justice. The liberal activists, Democratic senators and their media acolytes have been making the case that O’Connor has...

The great irony of America is that it has achieved so much public good by letting people simply tend to their private business. By contrast, the most disastrous social experiments of our age –Marxism and its less ambitious offspring-- have ruined so many private lives by holding the “public good” so high that no one life seemed to matter. But the public good is, in the end, nothing more than the sum of several million seemingly insignificant private lives. You cannot dispose of these individuals and their individual rights and somehow increase the public good. That is why last week’s...

U.S. Supreme Court says cities have broad powers to take property.

Foreign Law and the U.S. Constitution By Kenneth Anderson Kenneth Anderson is professor of law at the Washington College of Law, American University, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Email: kanders@wcl.american.edu. Website: http://kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Roper v. Simmons,1 which endorsed the use of foreign and international law in U.S. constitutional adjudication, has at least the virtue of putting everyone’s cards on the table. Until that decision was handed down (on March 1, 2005), it remained possible to view the appearance of foreign law in constitutional decisions as nothing more than a minor...

Please join me in writing your Congressman to ask for a Bill of Impeachment for Justice Breyer. -------------- Supreme Court citing more foreign cases. Scalia: Only U.S. views are relevant By Joan Biskupic USA TODAY "WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's reference to foreign law in a ruling last month that overturned state anti-sodomy statutes stood out as if it were in bold print and capital letters. ..."full article------------ I'm "picking" on Justice Breyer because of his outspoken attitudes towards using foreign law, especially in his aired discussion with Justice Scalia. Justices debate use of foreign precedentsI sent this letter to...

Top of the fold -- Judicial Supremacists and the Despotic Branch... The U.S. Constitution suffered some serious setbacks this week. The future of liberty and the rule of law suffered likewise. It's bad enough that Democrat obstructionists are once again denying President George Bush's federal-bench nominees their constitutionally prescribed up-or-down vote by the full Senate. In a fine example of why we need those nominees on the bench, Leftists on the Supreme Court are, again, "interpreting" the so-called "living Constitution" as a method of altering that venerable document by judicial diktat. Worse yet, these Left-judiciary Supremacists -- Justice Anthony Kennedy...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 5-4 yesterday that capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment to those individuals who were under 18 when they committed the crime, and therefore, unconstitutional. Just 15 years ago the Supreme Court found that the statute in question was constitutional. However, they state that because 18 of the 38 states that have death penalty laws forbid executing minors (at the time of the crime), this represents an emerging national consensus. When will the courts begin interpreting the law rather than writing it? Additionally, they rattled off a list of foreign laws...